7 gigantic market research mistakes you should avoid
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Market research is a consistent process through which companies collect data on any concept which assists them in making better decisions. With this data, you can gain better knowledge about the consumer., improve customer satisfaction rate, and reduce customer churn. It also provides valuable information about the existing and new product opportunities. The process can be performed through surveys, communicating with a group of people (known as a sample), organising interviews, and more.
But many people think it’s a piece of cake. But it’s not like that. You need to check the quality of samples, data, survey questions and more. If you fail to maintain the quality of these factors, it becomes worthless research.
So, in this blog, we will discuss 7 major mistakes to avoid during the research.
How do we overcome these 7 mistakes while conducting market research?
Not having any research objective
Before conducting your market research, it’s vital to have a clear goal. If you don’t have any goal, specific requirements or questions to answer, the entire research effort will be in vain. When you know your goal, you can create a well-defined research strategy and encourage your team to be motivated. Thus, take your time to build clear goals like understanding customers’ needs, evaluating the impact of marketing campaigns, analysing market demand and the latest trends, identifying opportunities, etc. These objectives strengthen your research work and ensure the collection of qualitative data.
Ignoring competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is the necessary task that helps you to understand their strategies, SEO rankings, services they are providing, target audience, opportunities or threats, strengths, and weaknesses. However, if you completely ignore researching competitors, you will be at risk of making uninformed decisions. As a result, you will miss lots of potential opportunities.
Many people believe that they have enough industry knowledge. So, they don’t need any competitor analysis. However, this approach is wrong because no matter what industries are evolving. That’s why you should embrace the changes in decision-making. Competitor analysis will help you to understand these changes.
Never compromise with data quality
Ensure that the data you have collected is genuine. So, take care of your data interpretation strategies. Avoid inadvisable statistical methods and redundancy which result in wrong outputs. Then, remove the biassed questions and poorly designed surveys during the process. Instead, try to apply the appropriate data structures to analyse the data for the given size and confidence level of samples.
Again, testing the apparatus and data collection methods and rampantly validating the data is necessary to ensure quality.
But if you need help with data quality, you must hire expert agencies or vendors with proven track records of handling market research for complex projects.
Poor sample
It’s necessary to target the right audience to perform a quality survey. If you choose the wrong people to ask the questions, the entire effort behind the analysis will be in vain. Thus, first, you need to understand who your audience is and why you’re preferring them. Here, you can set your own rules to pick the right audience.
If your audience needs to be divided into sub-groups, you may require further analysis.
But be transparent about the quality and credibility of the output. Ensure that all the participants respond and do not create their responses with the help of professional respondents.
Not adding a benchmark in the research
When you explore a product, you need to test whether it can fulfil the promise. For this reason, you need to set a benchmark to get the accurate result. But what does it mean by benchmark? Well, it’s a technique to run a comparison test between the on-demand version and other suggested variations of that particular product.
For example, if you want to study Jerked Chicken Pizza, test it against the existing Classic Chicken Pizza. Then, check why the new concept would thrive in the market and what makes it exceptional from the existing one. Additionally, it’s recommended that the market potentials, risks, opportunities, and others for the new product be checked rigorously.
That’s why the benchmarking process will guide you in recognising the increment or suppression of demand for the new product within the industry or your scope.
Inadequate communication
Communication is the key when you’re going through market research. Inadequate communication causes a low response rate from the participants of a survey. Thus, devote your time crafting your questions and then analysing whether these are the perfect questions for this survey.
Then create a strategy to deliver the information and instructions to the participants. Your success depends on how strategically and flawlessly you deploy the instructions to the participants.
Ensure your invitations and notifications clearly describe what you want from a person to do and why they need to do it. For example, to send them email invitations, you must add proper subject lines and a call to action. This initiative will improve the response rate. Also, use a friendly and conversational language for writing the invitations.
In this way, you can utilise the power of clear-cut communication.
Ambiguous reports
Always avoid ambiguous reporting. So, ensure that you have prominent evidence to prove the authoritativeness of the report. Thus, the dilemmatic languages like ‘might’, ‘may’, and ‘some’ should be omitted. So, be clear about what you’ve found through research, their meanings, and the utmost outcomes. But don’t cluster or overstate your findings. It will result in a vague report.
For instance, don’t sum up the behaviours of the audience of the same demographics. Also, never generalise a specific consumer segment. Thus, state how much is suitable for creating a balanced report.
Conclusion
Market research is a critical task. So, execute the strategy. You need to define your objectives, utilise the proper size of the sample, test your data quality, and validate your reports. But avoiding these 7 mistakes will provide you with the best results. So, embrace the digital landscape and create a journey of qualitative research.
